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I have a powerpoint file containing images and it has gotten too big for emailing and I need to decide which slides to cut out. But how can I tell which slides are consuming all the space? There could be just a few slides containing over-large images, but how do I know which slides they are? Is there any way to know the filesize of individual slides?

6 Answers 6

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There is a built-in way to measure slides! Publish all slides and use Windows Explorer.

Publishing all slides to an empty folder creates as many presentations as slides you have. Each new presentation stands for one slide and its Windows Explorer file size shows you which slide has the biggest pictures/audio/video.

  1. File, Save & Send, Publish Slides, Publish Slides (button)
    enter image description here

  2. Select All - I recommend using Select All the first time so you can see the size of all your slides. Choose destination Windows folder. Publish
    enter image description here

  3. Review sizes and you can launch each individual-slide powerpoint file to see which one it is and whether you can reduce the size. After you have made ammendments you can individually choose which slides to Publish and see what effect your edits have made.
    enter image description here

    In my sample I had 3 slides with different kinds of media. And the first slide with 12 MB was indeed the biggest one.

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    One caveat: Suppose you have a large image on slide 1 and you've copied it to several other slides. PowerPoint only stores the image once per presentation, but if you publish to multiple presentations, each presentation that includes this image would get a copy of it. It'd look quite large, but deleting it from the original presentation wouldn't have nearly such a large effect on overall size. Apr 6, 2014 at 15:33
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    Another caveat - the names of the slides are "slide IDs" which are not the same as the slide numbers. If you've copied or reordered slides it could get confusing.
    – Rob I
    Jul 16, 2015 at 15:51
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    Another caveat - the Publish option requires a Professional version of PowerPoint. Dec 2, 2015 at 19:52
  • @SteveRindsberg: Your comment that PowerPoint stores only a single copy of a reused image is indeed correct. However, would that reused image need to be copied over if each slide is made into its own presentation using the technique shown here? Presentation_002.pptx would need its own copy of the image, since it is now a standalone, one-slide presentation on its own without any way to reference copied images from other slides, would it not? Mar 23, 2016 at 20:48
  • When you save/export a slide/slides, PPT takes care of the accounting for reused images. That is, if the slide references a reused image, the standalone version of the slide will get a copy of the image. That's why I mentioned that the size might be misleading. Mar 24, 2016 at 3:44
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This might depend on the specific version of PowerPoint, but in the version I'm using it is possible to save the presentation as 'Strict Open XML Presentation' file type, which is essentially a zip file with all the elements represented as files within the archive (in some cases this would actually be the default, so no need to 'save as'). So, one can rename the file from .pptx to .zip, open it, and see the sizes of the different element (as well as compression ratio). A good candidate place would be to look under ppt/media. Besides just large images (which can be then easily found and compressed or modified/removed within PowerPoint), in some cases it may contain images from unused master slides, and you may not even know they exist (especially if you are reusing presentations based on someone else's templates). In this case the way to handle it would be to open View -> Slide Master, and browse the master slides to find the one comprising the pictures (and potentially just delete it, if it is not used by any of the slides).

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    Just a note to duplicate the file before you rename it and go digging so you have a solid backup. Also on the Mac you can open a .pptx with something like The Unarchiver (free) directly and it will expand it into the package contents without requiring renaming first. Jul 18, 2018 at 21:56
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The easiest way in the latest Powerpoint 365 or any other version is: Save a copy of your presentation with ending PPTX. Rename the ending to .ZIP Unzip the file, and you will see all individual content. Your pictures will be in the folder under the directory ppt/media. Usually, I found PNG files to be largest, so avoid them. sort your files by size, and convert the largest to jpg. Then remove your original pictures in the PPT file and use the jpg files to replace them.

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To make your slide deck smaller, quickly, try PowerPoint > File > Compress Pictures. This process just reduced a Mac PowerPoint file (version 16.11) that's photography-heavy from 40MB to 14MB with no degradation in presentation quality.

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    Welcome to Super User! This doesn't answer the question which OP asked, which is about determining the sizes of images, not necessarily compressing them.
    – bertieb
    Apr 4, 2018 at 15:15
  • This is related enough that I think it is reasonable to retain as an answer. The main reason that most people want to know image size is to optimize or remove those images. For some users this capability will be adequate to meet their needs without them needing to identify the individual culprits. Jul 18, 2018 at 22:00
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I wrote a small UNIX script that will unzip a pptx file and then shows you the list of larger images (over 100K) sorted by size. It will also have an "open" command (on the Mac) and it will tell you what slides each of the large images are in.

https://gist.github.com/dmccreary/7734b7148f523771adb38597bcbe5732

Feedback welcome.

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I'm using Powerpoint 365 and I really, really miss the publish slides feature. The zip instructions in this thread didn't work for me but gave me and idea that worked which was using the 'Package Presentation for CD' feature. Open your PPT, go to Export, Package Presentation for CD, Package for CD, change name if you need to, PPT name should be selected in box, hit Copy to Folder, choose where to save files and remember location, hit OK, hit Yes for linked items. Go to your new set of folders, unzip/extract the zip file, and there should be one with all of your images which you can view by details and sort by file size. My path: PresentationCD\PPT_Name\ppt\media

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